The Chronicle of Higher Education: Colloquy

Most Shakespeare scholars dismiss as nonsense the question of whether Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. But that doesn't mean they don't have plenty to argue over when it comes to Shakespeare's biography. The latest to try to piece together the Bard's life into a coherent whole is Stephen Greenblatt, the Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, whose new biography is Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton). How did the son of a glove maker and local burgher end up as a luminary in the London theater? Was Shakespeare raised as a Roman Catholic in a time when Catholics were viewed as traitors? Was he a crabbed and penny-pinching social climber? Is it worth even trying to figure out what kind of man Shakespeare was when we have his works? Does the new book do justice to the man? Read more...

I'm not going to waste my money on Greenblatt's book, because I can see it now: Shakespeare (sic) "must have" read the literature of the Western world at the grammar school he "must have" attended, and so on. Or this one: he saw a play as a teenager and then, 30-odd years later, wrote "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to commemorate the event. Where did he get his learning? (and sorry, Bardoloters, he was "vastly" more erudite than Jonson, not the other way around) By "plunging into the streets."

"Plunging into the streets"?

They must have been some streets.

Oxford grew up with the two largest private libraries in England available to him. Did he read all that was there? Let's say he didn't; but references to those books appear in his plays anyway.

"Conspiracy"? In Elizabethan England? Preposterous! Conspiracy is how government works, folks. Ask John Stubbs and Ben Jonson.

Whitman was right.

The "university of life" is NOT "more precise" than the University.

So it was Oxford; so we were lied to; so what.

Does any of this matter?

Say what you will, I found
Greenblatt's beautifully written book the best thing on the life and times of Shakespeare ever, just as Gopnik in the New Yorker described it. One instance: I hadn't realized that topical discussions of religion and politics were verboten in Elizabethan England, which, given Shakespeare's prudent nature, goes a long way towards explaining the absence of much such in his plays. Also, the description of the"Catholic" folk culture of the time -- May Pole dances, Morality Plays, etc. -- was most enlightening; you could begin to see where Shakespeare was coming from, and yet how new and exciting the new medium of the London theatre really was. It was the internet of its age.

Experts might find much to quibble with in Greenblatt's approach, but for beginners it is just what the doctor ordered. So put envy aside, and give the devil his due!

'Dick' Sullivan: "Does any of this matter?"

Do you?

Dear Oxford was an unctious over-bearing aristocrat (whom among them isn't? One would ask) hung up on himself and wishing to share the obsession.

He made himself known to William again and yet -- again -- always imposing his "superior" views on the playwright who, in a tiring effort to placate this and othered lettered wannabes, simply blew lyrical "marble dust" into the text of his current work in progress -- much like a besieged sculptor pretending to refine his work before the eyes of an overbearing patron.

Assailed by one or more of these boors (sic) left him weary, of a defensive stance and ever more committed to making his own fortune and way in a society that nourished his creativity but was oblivious of his own kingly state of genius.

"For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."
SONNET 29

I read a review of Greenblatt's biography which spoke about Shakespeare's relations to his daughters, and Lear- and his relation to Hamnet his son who died at the age of eleven-and Hamlet. I think that this kind of information helps us ' fill out a certain picture of the creator' we would like to have. This picture can ideally expand and expand, be interpreted and re- interpreted as the great works themselves. But the gap between the biographical details the story which is after all a story like hundreds of thousands of others, and the miraculous transformation that is the great plays remains just as inexplicable as ever. What might help more, and what we of course can never hope to get is something like a Shakespearean spiritual autobiography. Perhaps the first source for such a work might be the Sonnets, but beyond them the material is simply not there.
It seems to me one can read a book of Greenblatt's with great pleasure without expecting that it will provide any basic answer to the mystery and wonder of the Shakespeare miracle.

As with any academic discipline, Shakespearean Studies is prone to a political spectrum of different views. In this case, the centrists would have you believe that questions of authorship are reserved for 'looneys' and the under-read.

Anyone new to the authorship question should read Thomas Looney's "Shakespeare" Identified, which is available online here:

http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/etexts/si/00.htm

Contrary to what was stated in the article here as far as 19th century 'crackpot' authorship theories being largely disreputed, the Oxfordian theory really began with this book, in 1920 and really only requires Looney's book to convince, or at the very least bring up some of the most relevant points.

Edward de Vere (17th earl of oxford) likely wrote the plays normally attributed to Shakespeare, at least in some sense, since 'Shakespeare' in some cases was more than likely a workshop of different authors overseen by de Vere.

The de Vere theory is the only one that makes sense to me, especially in terms of (as mentioned previously) how 'shakespeare' got his learning - literary, legal, and the extensive knowledge he betrays regarding courtly matters.

In one brief example - if the 'stratford man' was in posession of the extensive legal knowledge displayed in the plays, why would he have have had the legal documents we are in posession of written by someone else, and signed in a script that betrays an unfamiliarity with letters?

I wonder about this comment in the article -

'"Shakespeare decided fairly early on that he wasn't going to be a victim in this life," says Mr. Greenblatt. "That he wasn't going to be eating dog food. He was actually going to make it. He didn't want his father's life and he didn't want the life of those writers whom he encountered when he went up to London."'

Plausible in a way. He did 'make it,' outdoing even Podhoretz in that vein; he did accumulate money, property, a coat of arms. But the part about deciding fairly early on, about not going to be a victim, about not wanting his father's life and that of writers - that seems dubious. If he really had firmly decided, in a Scarlett O'Hara-ish sort of way, that by golly whatever else happened he damn well wasn't going to wind up poor, he wasn't going to eat dog food - then why on earth did he do what he did? It was hardly the safe path. It was hardly the obvious way to get rich. It wasn't even a good bet. It wasn't even as sensible as trying to be a movie star now. There was no precedent whatever for provincial boys to go to London and get rich by acting and writing plays. To put it mildly. You didn't get rich by acting or writing plays; if you wanted to get rich, acting and writing plays would not be the way to do it. As a matter of fact, acting and writing plays would have looked like a sure path to dog food-eating, at best. He couldn't have known in advance (to be specific, he couldn't have known in 1585) that he would do what he did - he couldn't even really have thought it was likely, or even possible. He couldn't even point wildly, as a fantasizing teenager will, to a Madonna or Jennifer Lopez sort of precedent, because there wasn't one. Acting in plays was actually criminal behavior unless you were in one of the very few licensed companies. What Shakespeare did was so reckless, irresponsible, almost loony, at the time he did it, that it is hard to reconcile with a settled determination to avoid the dog food and failure path. He did the opposite of make a determined effort to grab security and money; he took an immense, absurd risk. We forget that, because it turned out so well, but he couldn't have known or even guessed that.

So somehow the litigious land-hugging Shakespeare of later years has to be reconciled with the maniac of 21. And it can't really be done because, alas, he didn't write a journal. If only he had...

Sartre wrote:

> 'Dick' Sullivan: "Does any of this matter?"
>
> Do you?

Don't we all? But, then, what's the measure of a man.

I haven't read the book but have theorized about the bard myself. All of this theory and guesswork about authorship occupies our imaginations and delights us. My experience dictates we continue to wonder & enjoy the material for its beauty and wisdom regardless...thanks

PS...remember the playwright who was asked to explain the title of his play???? It was scrawled on a public restroom wall and he used it.... how many educators asked students to analyze that one???

Jeanie

It was interesting to read about "New Historicism" re Shakespeare's work and I feel that this is certainly a more valid and realistic approach than attempts to relate Shakespeare to Marxism or feminism or post-modernism, or whatever. But I think we can incorporate Shakespeare's allusions to contemporary events and polemics (obvious and veiled) with some sort of autobiographical connection. For example, the thing that struck me most when I read "Hamlet" was how profoundly Shakespeare described depression and it seems to me that he must have been experiencing, or had recently experienced, chronic depression when he wrote the play. Of course, we know that depression was characterised in those days as an excess of black bile but I don't think the chemistry of the brain was much different then than today. It would seem valid to suppose that Shakespeare’s chronic depression was a result of his son Hamnet's death (especially with the slight name change!) but maybe there were other factors.
On the subject of names, I think Shakespeare had a brother named Edmund; does anyone see something strange in his naming one of his most despicable villains after his brother?

Shakespeare and Cervantes both died April 23, 1616.
Coincidence, conspiracy? The truth is: Don Quijote wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.

Sancho Panza

I don't have any problem with Greenblat's analysis of either the Bard's life, or his works. I could find nothing in the reviews that necessarily undermines Shakespere's credibility as the foremost dramatist, or a respected citizen of the Elizabethean England. If anything, the new book seems to bring into right perspective the life and times of Shakespere, helping us make sense of his often obscure plays ( Midsummer's night dream, Hamlet and the likes) Though some subjectivity seems to have crept in, as when his catholic ties are discussed, but again, as one of the reviewer has pointed out, Greenblat is not a 'biographer.' And deep into the post-modern era, to moot on wherther Shakespere was a penny-pinching egoist, may not make much sense at all. Colloquy Moderator wrote:

Author: arlo
Date: 09-28-04 20:07:
Sartre wrote:
> 'Dick' Sullivan: "Does any of this matter?"
>> Do you?
>> Don't we all? But, then, what's the measure of a man.

Hopefully nothing that has anything to do with this crap.

It may be just as well that we don't know too much about the "real" Shakespeare. Consider writers of the modern era, about whom we know all too much. Quite wonderful writers, with rare insights into the human condition, prove upon examination to be less than admirable human beings - some are even crabbed and penny-pinching social climbers.
Still, it is fun to speculate about the "real" Shakespeare. Is there any reason why he couldn't have been the man from Stratford? The plays show that the writer was a person of extraordinary intelligence. Given that that person becomes a hanger-on and then a member of theatrical troupes that perform in the great houses of London, isn't it entirely possible that through observation and reading that person might have been able to acquire the information that grounds the plays?
It seems he certainly would have had the time. He comes up to London alone at an early age - running away from too much responsibility too soon, one imagines - as well as running toward something, anything that will engage that massive and restless intelligence. Again, the little factual information we have about him shows him to have been a private person - plenty of time for reading and thinking there, and contacts with the rich and powerful, made possible by his theatrical associations, would have given him access to great libraries.
In addition to the plays and poetry, Shakespeare has left us with a wonderful mystery.

Has there always been a form of snobbishness about the authenticity of Shakespeare because of his middle class origins? The alternatives are usually from the upper class: Bacon, Earl of Oxford, Marlowe, even Elizabeth Regina! Maybe the Marxists would have preferred a member of the English proletariat (if there was a proletariat then!). And it may rile some people to reflect on the notion that this great writer was a mere penny-pinching bourgeoisie rather than, for example, a wild, dissolute alcoholic, or an opium-ingesting, bi-polar, sybarite.

How about a boring, social-climbing middle-class writers Hall of Fame? My initial nominations would be Chaucer, Shakespeare and that wanna-be playboy Charles Dickens

I haven't seen any reference in this thread to Michael Wood's PBS documentary, "In Search of Shakespeare," which I found excellent and persuasive. Does Dr. Greenblatt refer to it? I believe Wood did all his own research for it, and he doesn't refer to any critics or scholars in his film.

I'd always suspected Will of being Catholic or having Catholic tendencies, but Wood clinched the case--for me, anyway.

I haven't yet read this new book of Greenblatt's, but in his earlier one on Hamlet's ghost (which I reviewed for a magazine), I sensed him circling and circling around this whole question of Sh.'s Catholicism. It would be a pity if he did not reference Wood's work--but maybe it wasn't available then either.

C'mon, pal. Class has nothing to do with it; access to information is where it's at.

Shaksper didn't read the world's lit in Richard Field's printing shop; or write "Hamlet" after overhearing a conversation at The Mermaid; or write expertly on law and Italian mores the same way.

You just described Oxford.

Greenblatt, as all Stratfordian insiders know, has been sitting on the fence concerning the growing Catholic Bard movement within their own camp since the mid-1990s.
He knows like the great Shakespeare scholars since Malone and Halliwell-Phillips that the non-sectarian character of the literary works cannot esaily be backfitted to a sectarian siege-mentlaity of a secret Roman Catholic in Reformation England. So Greenblatt dabbles with the Catholic Connection here and there but conveniently ignores crucial Jacobean-era documetary evidence of the family's continuing almost defiant attachment to Catholicism long after 1588...such as Susanna (the oldest child) appearing on a recusancy list in April 1606 after Gunpowder Plot (can you imagine?) and her Dad's purchase of the notorious Catholic safehouse or hideout in London (the Blackfriar's Gatehouse) in March 1613. Greenblatt cherry-picks around to avoid these crucial pieces of solid non-literary evidence because they require a more fulsome embrace of the idea that the real Bard (if the Stratford man is the right guy) was a secret Roman Catholic. Greenblatt cannot swallow that so he plays around with the "master of the double consciousness" theme to have it both ways. For more on how the Catholic-flavored biographical evidence/dots have ripped apart Stratfordian unity see my forthcoming essay: "Connecting the Dots: The Catholic Question and the Shakespeare Authorship Debate" in the forthcoming issue of the Tennessee Law Review.

"Greenblatt, as all Stratfordian insiders know, has been sitting on the fence concerning the growing Catholic Bard movement within their own camp since the mid-1990s."

Ooh, cool, there's a movement. Hurray. It's been so long since there was a movement - what a thrill to have one again. And it's growing, too, and it's within their own camp - better and better. Let's all meet at midnight in the cemetery and swap dead cats, shall we?

The play within the play is not the thing
Wherein we catch the playwright's consciousness;
The man behind the man behind the scene
We know not to call Bill, or Frank, or Chris,
Or Eddie -- So detractors will declaim
With grave demeanor; poker-faced, will tell
That Stratford missed the mark -- What's in a name,
That alchemy that knows not how to spell?
Should learned Oxford don the mantle? Nay,
Who best to hold aloft standards of proof
Unburdened by consensus of the day
And by a mad inversion, held aloof?
But wild and whirling words like leaves must fall,
Signifying nothing, and thus, all.

Ah, T.B., access to information. I suppose it's a mark of Oxford's learning that Shakespeare only has a total of about 10 or a dozen seriously literary sources in his works (Ovid, Chaucer, Montaigne, maybe Homer and maybe not, Holinshed, + a few cheap pamphlets such as Greene's "Pandosto" (WT), and maybe Boccacio (T&C) and a few others).

It's surprising, isn't it, that every classical and foreign source in Shakespeare "happens" to have been translated into English or adapted into cheap pamphlet form before it appears as a source in Shakespeare?

It may be even more surprising that this man who's so familiar with the mores and manners of Italy has Portia take a ferry from Padua to Venice (or maybe it's from Genoa to Venice--Portia's rhetoric in MV III.iv.47-55 isn't quite clear--a trip that would take about 10 times as long in a boat as it would overland). Regardless, Padua is about 20 miles or so inland of Venice and no ferries run on dirt as far as I know.

This sophisticated traveler also locates a seashore on Bohemia.

This ostensibly trained lawyer displays a so-called extensive knowledge of law that is limited, pretty much, to the language of contracts (simple common-law stuff that anyone who had anything to do with money would have known).

Everyone used scriveners for their legal documents.

It is class that makes people doubt. Someone who traveled in Shakespeare's circles would have had more than enough access to the raw materials of the plays (and poems) to do what he did, presuming an equivalent level of talent and inspiration.

But let's not confuse this discussion with facts. That would be so much less fun.

"A workshop of different authors." You mean a team of writers, like the great minds who compose sitcoms? Well, that would explain why Shakespeare's style differs from those of Marlowe, Bacon, et al. --it's a composite.

Not only could a provincial glover's son not have written these plays, but there's no way the illegitimate son of a servant and a small-town notary could have painted Mona Lisa. As for that son of a second-rate musician who claimed to have composed "Don Giovanni," give me a break. The foul-mouthed little clown never even went to a conservatory.

Ain't genius a bitch?

I will accept Oxford as the auther of the plays eagerly if someone can show me how to resolve the problem of plays after 1604 (Oxford's death).

sarge wrote:

> How about a boring, social-climbing middle-class writers Hall
> of Fame? My initial nominations would be Chaucer, Shakespeare
> and that wanna-be playboy Charles Dickens

Sarge: Interesting that you include Dickens in your list because Dickens was haunted and obsessed with the financial failure of his father, just as Greenblatt supposes Shakespeare was after his father’s descent into impecuniousness. Dickens is also another great example of how literary genius can strike anywhere in an educated populace. If we knew almost nothing about his life, would we be searching for higher-class alternatives to explain the extraordinary outpouring of brilliance from someone of undistinguished background?
Also, I take issue with your descriptions "boring" (how is Dickens boring?) and "wanna-be playboy". Is the latter a reference to his affair with Ellen Tenning?

27 of the 36 dramas in the First Folio were composed and performed before Oxford's death. Thise leaves nine dramas but only three...at best have been serious candidates for a post-1604 composition. The Stratfordians have NEVER made a solid case that The Tempest refers to the Bermudas...based on a shipwreck story relating to an expedition there in 1610-1611. Macbeth contains profanity which was outlawed by royal edict in early 1606.
Since the Gunpowder Plot came in late November 1605, the effort to make it a post-Gunpowder plot drama is highly dubious. The odds favor a pre-1604/1605 composition, perhaps by many years. I believe that there is one other drama involving a Stratfordian claim that Shakespeare borrowed something from a post-1604 Jonson drama...but the borrowing could have been the reverse.

Oxford almost certainly did not write the entire canon all by himself...some dramas....no doubt came from the pen of his son-in-law William Stanley (W.S. on the title pages of some dramas) who also has strong circumstantial evidence in his favor. Shakespeare was a pen name for a Dual Bard...Oxford and Derby.
Peter Dickson

To Rick Hawkins

I personally don't find Dickens boring (as a writer) - I once very narrowly missed destroying my marriage because I spent an entire Cjristmas holiday reading Bleak House -to the exclusion of conversation with my in-laws and just about all else - but I wonder if Dickens was a great dinner companion - and yes, that was an allusion to l'affaire.

"boring" - as in "not Brendan Behan"

I am particularly interested in the 91st sonnet, which the book utterly fails to discuss. If the author of the 91st sonnet had said, "Thy love means more to me than being king," it would have undercut the sincerity of the sonnets profoundly -- only a monarch could be sincere with those words. The context of all the sonnets is consistently just the two components, exaltation or elevation of the beloved peruser, and self-abasement of the writer. Thus, I submit that when the writer penned, "Thy love means more to me than high birth," he/she did in fact have high birth. A middle-class writer (the Avon actor) would be self-elevating with those pretentions, at the very least.

I have read as many as seven or eight biographies on Shakespeare. I just finished Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in The World. This book is, without a doubt, the most superior work I have ever read about Shakespeare’s life. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in how Shakespeare was formed. Greenblatt’s sweeping understanding of the time that Shakespeare lived in, his ability to connect the content of many of the plays and sonnets to what was happening in real time during the Elizabethan era and his clear, lyrical prose style make this a book you will not be able to put down once you pick it up. It is a “must read” for anyone interested in Shakespeare.

One of the most interesting unanswered questions about Shakespeare is the question of what he himself thought of himself, and what he was doing. Did he have a concept of his own ' genius'? Did he think of himself as Borges and Joyce would think of him as ' the creator who after God had created most?' Did he feel in the whole process of creation the miracle the joy of what he was doing when he was creating whole worlds of poetry and meaning beyond any simple linear historical explanation?
A master craftsman, a magician, a maker of dreams, a builder of worlds and characters, a great adventurer in the realm of the deepest creative imagination- did Shakespeare in the very act of creation feel his power a ' gift of God' and a greater wealth than the house he would retire to and die shortly after in ?
Or did Shakespeare really never know that he was ' Shakespeare' and did his time not allow him to perceive himself in the way subsequent generations would perceive him, as the greatest of all human creators in language?

>Rick Hawkins wrote:

"On the subject of names, I think Shakespeare had a brother named Edmund; does anyone see something strange in his naming one of his most despicable villains after his brother?"

per Joyce's Ulysses: Richard (ala III) and Edmund, brothers and villains both. Will must have had quite a homelife growing up. Brothers fist-fight, tussle, tease and in small villages I imagine play romantic rivals. It's cool to think he did wear the cuckold's horns, but probably it was a brother's gentle inside joke.

The man who tells you that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is relative, is asking you not to believe him. So don't...
Roger Scruton

The four so-called 'romances' all have a clearly defined five act structure necessitated by the time needed to trim the candles in the private theatres for which they were written. These came into fashion c. 1610 so how can Oxford have planned a major structural feature of his plays to fit a development that came along when he was rotting away.
Shakespeare also seems to think Milan is on the coast of Italy while it would have been far easier for him to pick up facts about high society than it would have been for a magnate to do the same for the rude mechanicals.
As for Greenblatt's book, he overdoes the catholic stuff because the folk culture had nothing particularly catholic about it, though naturally it was affected by centuries of catholicism. But it's also true that the theology of the Church of England in his time was pure Calvinism - predestination isn't a fertile soil for drama.
No sybarite, I agree. But not bi-polar? Come on... The imagination that produced the sonnets must have been at least emotionally bisexual.
His writings also suggest that Shakespeare didn't like dogs and suffered badly from insomnia.
Finally, the phrase 'tender loving care' actually comes from Shakespeare! How it happened that some adman happened to be looking in one of the more obscure |Henry VI plays, is enough of a mystery in itself.

Greenblatt overdoes the Catholic stuff. The folk culture contained plenty besides Catholicism. Nevertheless, the theology of the Church of England was at that time pure Calvinism. Denial of free will seems a poor soil for drama.
Sybaritic, drunken - no. But not bi-polar? Come on... To have written the sonnets Shakespeare must have been at least imaginatively bisexual.
To judge from his writings, Shakespeare disliked dogs and suffered badly from insomnia.
Finally, there's one quotation that never comes in any of the dictionaries: 'tender loving care'! Some adman or other must have been looking at one of the obscure Henry VI plays (Part II I think), though where, when, or why, is just another mystery...

Everybody has his own life, Shakespeare,as well.
I think we should put more attention to what he conveyed to us through his work, but not too much details of his passed life.
We are not so perfect because we are not the God��

Just for the record, all of the anti-Stratfordians have to rely on re-dating the plays in ways which are stark nonsense. In the case of Oxford, one has to eitehr redate Macbeth, or attribute to him some precognitive ability. The play abounds with references to the Guy Fawkes plot, which occurred in 1605 (or thereabouts). Oxford died the year before.

In the manner of all intellectual frauds, the anti-Stratfordians marshall one-leged facts, and sound great when they are on the attack. It is when they try to make the case for a different author that the looney tunes begin.

Like it or not, the kid fromthe sticks is the 'onlie begetter'.

Greenblatt's book is superb.

No evidence exists that any of the plays were written after 1604 (the year Shaksper left London). Even good ol' A. L. Rowse attest to this.

Bermuda ... gunpowder plots ... get a grip, people.

Only 10 classical authors alluded to? Where'd you get that notion? And how would the unlettered glover's son allude to plays that weren't translated into English yet? Again, by listening to classical scholars over a pint at the Mermaid Tavern (of Universal Knowledge)?

His Italian plays. "The Merchant of Venice." This is such a detailed exploration of their mores that I can't go into it here; it's deep---read up on it.

Law? check out an on-line "Hamlet" that has explanations of all the legal references in the play. More than just deeds or documents or whatever the author of "Alas T.B." stated.

The Catholic issue is a biggie but I couldn't care less.

To say that the Sonnets are "literary exercises" and don't concern real people is to take away their power; I'd avoid doing this. The author was most likely a freak; deal with it.

I'm sure his kinsman Stanley had a hand in the editing of the plays.

If you were to take the speculation out of Greenblatt's book, how many pages would you be left with? Six? So what makes this a good book?

Oh, T.B., thanks for the corrections; I'm glad to be made wise. As for the questions you raise:

Italian mores: I wrote my dissertation and have published since on 17th-century English travelers to Italy, so I'm fairly up on that particular stuff. It's not really all that obscure.

For the law in Hamlet, dude, it's just not that complex.

I said major sources, not allusions, and there aren't that many. Moreover, some that arguably hadn't yet been translated into English (e.g., Plautus's _Menaechmi_, the source of CofE) were on the grammar school curriculum and thus Shakespeare could easily have encountered them in Stratford. Moreover, they tend to be simpler texts which it wouldn't be surprising if someone of a non-university level would be able to work through in the original. The difficult stuff, as in Plutarch, was available in translation.

Just because something seems hard and obscure to a 21st-century reader (as in, a very basic education in the simpler classics, some simple knowledge of Italian manners), doesn't mean it was difficult for someone with the requisite intelligence, contacts, and motivations to figure it out in 1590.

Someone so keen and learned simply would not make the errors (seashores on Milan and Bohemia, ferry from Padua, a landlocked town, to Venice, etc.) Many playwrights of the time wrote reasonably convincing representations of Italy without having been there.

Little is known about virtually ANY author of the period; there are only a very small handfull of manuscripts or other documentary evidence (in fact, that for Shakespeare is somewhat better than average). He was't SHAKESPEARE at the time, he was just a guy writing plays for money. It's not surprising that people didn't cherish locks of his hair and the foul sheets of his scribblings. That whole notion of authorship is a construction of a time nearly two centuries after he died.

And I have no professional stake in this argument: it wouldn't make one whit of difference to me if definitive proof that Oxford wrote the plays came to light tomorrow. They'd still be the same texts.

Finally, when you tell people who date Macbeth to after Oxford's death to "get a grip," I think you need to watch for irony. There's a great deal of absurdity and very little solid in the Oxfordians' claims (and yes, I've read Ogburn), so make sure that the brush you use to tar others doesn't turn back on yourself.... And, the arguments for allusions to the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth are actually pretty solid and do not rely on complex and implausible conspiracy theorizing for their body.

David Evans

To Matthew Helm
re: It's cool to think he did wear the cuckold's horns, but probably it was a brother's gentle inside joke.

Gentle? Edmund is an absolute monster and Richard is an absolute monster of an absolute monarch! Now, I know he had no choice about Richard's name being the same as his brother's, but I'm not sure if Edmund was based on an historical figure.
Thanks for alluding to Joyce, I'd forgotten that conversation in "Ulysses". Maybe Shakespeare was as ambivalent about family as Jane Austen, for example (her fictional parents are almost all either dreadful or anodyne).

Years ago, when the controversy about who wrote the plays was full blown, I took a good course in the plays and the professor, a don from Cambridge, began the class by saying the following:

"First off, I would like to address the authorship question with this comment: the plays were not written by William Shakespeare; they were written by someone else named William Shakespeare."

I thought that settled it.

Perhaps we should consider that the important contribution that Stephen Greenblatt has made in his new biography is not "new" evidence of who wrote Shakespeare nor whether Shakespeare was a Recusant or whether he was Oxford or Stanley or Bacon or some other quite different: it is that through an examination of the plays he has re-created the world of Elizabethan/Jacobean England. It is a far cry from the 21st century. This biography reveals a contemporary mind examining a complex society reflected in the plays and introducing new speculation about the personality of a genius who held "as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form an pressure", who gave "to aery nothing/A local habitation and a name". The achievement is not in giving us conclusions where no conclusions can possibly be drawn but in offering us a fresh vision of Shakespeare and his world.
Speculation about the shadowy man who wrote the plays will continue and Stephen Greenblatt has offered us a vigorous and erudite speculation that serves to illuminate the plays and the society Shakespeare knew.

To Rick Hawkins:

"Gentle? Edmund is an absolute monster... Maybe Shakespeare was as ambivalent about family as Jane Austen"

No doubt about the ambivalence to family. Lear... Hamlet... etc. Families don't come off as the caring, solid basis of society; rather they seem a microcosm of its faults. Still, Edmund (unlike Iago) has his redemption, and we know (sorta) the historical Edmund was a player in London about the time Lear was first preformed. Edmund Shakespeare was the younger brother straining against the advantage of an older brother, as is the Edmund of Lear. I imagine, as a brother myself, that Will and Edmund were mis-matched rivals, and that Will, short of hating his brother, nudged him in the ribs a bit. Gently. A name in a play is not a punch in the mouth; it's a name in a play, and a play is all it was when written. Now, of course, it's more.

As for Richard: I think that's probably politics.

Cheers round to a good conversation. Except to the Oxford authorship folks -- per Occam's Razor, that debate is silly. Go get with the UFO fellas or Bermuda Triangle people or something. Vast literary conspiracies don't happen. They've never happened. EVER. Seriously, it's literature; the stakes are way too low.

This is for Ian Ferguson. I loved your analysis of Greenblatt's book. Exactly right on. It could not have been said better. Thank you.

Taking the measure of Shakespeare